How To Find Your Favorite Newsgroups - Locate a specific newsgroup, or a list of newsgroups related to a topic or keywords. You can perform a simple search that references a single newsgroup title such as "newsguy.general", or a compound search that will locate a collection of groups based upon a combination of "wildcard" characters and keywords that you enter into the search field. These "wildcard" characters are described in further detail below.
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 Search For A Newsgroup
 
 
 
 Customizing Your Search
 
* The asterisk symbol is a wild card search character. As an example, *.sports.* would find newsgroups that have the word sports in their newsgroup title, sports.* would find all groups that start with the word sports, and *.sports would find all groups that end with the word sports.
| The pipe symbol is used to join multiple searches. As an example sports.*|*.sports would list all groups that started with the word sports or ended with the word sports. It could also be used to search related newsgroups that might appear in different Usenet hierarchies, such as alt.sports.*|rec.sports.* which would find all newsgroups in the "alt" (Alternative) or "rec" (Recreation) hierarchies that utilized the word sports in their group titles.
& The ampersand symbol is a limiting character, meaning a search will only yield groups with one word beyond the "&" symbol. As an example, comp.& would retrieve a newsgroup title like "comp.ai" which only had two words in its title, while a group like "comp.ai.alife" would not be retrieved in this example because the title contains more than two total words.
^ This symbol is another limiting character, meaning the search will only detect newsgroup titles with no other characters to the left of the "^" symbol. As an example ^rec would pick up all newsgroups starting with the word "rec", but would ignore a newsgroup like "alt.recreation" because it does not begin with the word "rec" in this example.
 
 Search Examples
 
In addition to the typical search requests mentioned above, we've included some other examples of how "wildcard" characters and keywords can be used together to find collections of newsgroups that might be of interest to you. As mentioned, these are just a few examples, and we encourage you to experiment with different types of search combinations that best match the kind of newsgroups you might be looking for.

^comp.* - This search string would list all "comp" (Computer) newsgroups that appear in the comp category of groups. The "^" symbol will exclude newsgroups that do not begin with the word "comp".

bullet This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
comp.forsale
comp.pc.forsale
comp.pc.ibm.forsale
comp.misc
 
bullet It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
alt.comp.dataconversion
aus.computers
chile.comp.www
de.comp.periph.cdrom

*.pc.* - This search string will list any newsgroup on the news server that has the word ".pc." anywhere in its title.

bullet This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
comp.ibm.pc.hardware
comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
demon.ip.support.pc.announce
ger.pc.os2
 
bullet It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
alt.bbs.pcboard
alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
br.pc-l
alt.hk.spcc

comp.& - This search string will list newsgroup titles in the "comp" (Computer) hierarchy that have a total of two two words in their overall title.

bullet This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
comp.databases
comp.forsale
comp.misc
comp.software-eng
 
bullet It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
comp.admin.policy
comp.archives.ms-windows.announce
comp.cad.autocad
comp.databases.visual-dbase

comp*|*.pc.* - This search will list all the newsgroups in the "comp" hierarchy, in addition to all newsgroups that have the word ".pc." in their titles, regardless of the hierarchy where those "pc" groups may appear.

bullet This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
comp.ai.genetic
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
fido7.hardw.pc.video
symantec.support.devtools.pc.visual-cafe.java
 
bullet It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++
alt.sys.pc-clone.dell
aus.computers.mac